Insider edge

Rose Tang

John Kamm is engaged in culinary activities when I call to congratulate him on winning what has become known as the Genius Grant - a US$500,000 (HK$3.9 million) no-strings bequest from the MacArthur Foundation of Chicago.

While teaching his son to steam a label off a wine bottle - a tenuous connection to Food for Thought, but a connection nonetheless, Kamm downplays the award.

Each year, the foundation reaches out and taps 25-odd unsuspecting and presumably startled individuals on the shoulder with a cheque to spend as they please. Nobody applies. Half a million US dollars!

"The press says it's a lot of money,'' he says. "But spread over five years, and after taxes, there won't be much left, only US$70,000 to US$80,000 a year.''

The calculation comes in a businessman's tone. But he is a unique businessman indeed, one whose work on human rights has taken him well out of the sphere of commerce.

It's not Kamm's first award. He received the United States Department of Commerce's first Best Global Practices Award in 1997 from then US President Bill Clinton. In 2001, President George W Bush gave Kamm the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for his efforts to "engage the Chinese government in a results-oriented dialogue on human rights''.

A former regional vice-president for a multinational selling chemical products to China, and ex-president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, Kamm is proud to be the first businessman in the 23-year history of the MacArthur Foundation to be awarded the fellowship.

"What this award does is to give value and recognition to an approach to human rights,'' he says. "It's not the only approach to human rights. It exists among other approaches.''

The foundation notes in a press release that Kamm "has designed and implemented an original approach to freeing prisoners of conscience in China by leveraging business relationships. Kamm's pragmatic, case-by-case strategy complements human rights advocacy based on international conventions and principles.''

Kamm says his approach is to "marry the passion of a human rights activist with business skills''. Selling chemicals or human rights, the principles remain the same, he says, explaining his "Four Ps: patience, persistence, preparation and persuasion.''

It's my first time of hearing such a statement from Kamm. We became acquainted over the years - through food. Some of his Hong Kong media friends and I organised dinners with him as he passed through on his trips to and from the mainland.

Whether ordering the quintessential Hong Kong dish of steamed, smelly, salty fish in perfect Cantonese at the Conrad Hotel or marvelling at dishes at Mum Chau's Sichuan Kitchen, Kamm would rave about the banquets offered by officials during his most recent trips to Tibet, or whichever mainland spots he had just visited.

Over one dinner at Grappa's in 2002, Kamm was enthusing again, this time well beyond the topic of food. After discussing in detail with the manageress about how he would like the pasta sauces done, he showed me a photo of himself sitting next to a humble old Tibetan man. Kamm proudly declared that the man was Tagna Jigme Zangpo, one of China's longest-serving political prisoners. He was allowed to visit the 74-year-old teacher in Lhasa a few days earlier. Jigme Zangpo had been under house arrest for medical treatment after languishing in a Lhasa jail for nearly four decades. Kamm had been travelling to Tibet many times, lobbying officials to release him.

I listened to him jealously. As a Tiananmen massacre survivor myself, I admired and envied this American businessman who had done so much to help people on the mainland.

Less than a month after our dinner, I read in the news that Jigme Zangpo had been allowed to fly to the US for medical treatment, eight years before the end of his jail term was due to finish.

The freeing of Jigme Zangpo followed the release of five other Tibetan prisoners before the end of their sentences that year. And they were just some of the hundreds of political prisoners in China who were given freedom as a result of Kamm's dogged mission to persuade the Chinese government to face up to human rights issues.

He has been acting as a middleman on human rights issues between the US and China for decades. His San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation employs 10 people, including his Hong Kong-born wife Irene. His two sons and numerous other people around the world work as volunteers. But essentially Dui Hua, which means "dialogue'' in Mandarin, is a one-man band.

The lone crusader has travelled to China 70 times during the past 15 years, conducting a dialogue with Chinese and American officials. His sales pitch has been to "tell the Chinese government what's in it for them''.

"Having built long-standing ties of personal trust with Chinese officials at many levels, Kamm found that approaching them with dignity and respect facilitated their response to his inquiries and uncovered a wealth of information regarding the status and well-being of thousands of political prisoners [most of whom attract little attention outside China],'' says the MacArthur Foundation.

Robin Munro, research director of the Hong Kong-based labour rights group China Labour Bulletin, says while Kamm's aim does not differ from those of other human rights groups, his approach is unique. "He's built long-term contacts with the Chinese government who sees him as an interlocutor.''

Munro has known Kamm since 1991 while working as Hong Kong director for the New York-based Human Rights Watch. The two have worked together on hundreds of political prisoner cases on the mainland.

"If we needed someone to talk to the Chinese government directly and push from inside, we asked him for help,'' Munro says, adding that Beijing rarely deals directly with international human rights groups such as Amnesty International.

The 53-year-old Kamm, who wears silver-rimmed specs, admired Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr in his days at Princeton University where he studied anthropology and Chinese. His love affair with China started to blossom when he landed in Macau at the age of 21. His mission to free Chinese political prisoners was forged by the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.

Shortly after June 4, Kamm, then serving as vice-president of Amcham, pushed the chamber for a resolution condemning the massacre. But while many were lobbying the US government not to renew China's Most Favoured Nation trading status in order to press Beijing to improve human rights, Kamm argued in Congressional testimony in 1990 that it should be maintained, promising he would help get political prisoners released.

"I just stuck my finger in the dyke,'' he says.

Shortly before that, he had successfully lobbied Zhou Nan, the then head of Xinhua News Agency in Hong Kong, to release a Hong Kong student detained on the mainland following the massacre.

Kamm gave up his high-flying executive life, complete with chauffeur and Mercedes. Armed with lists of prisoners that he compiled with human rights groups, he travelled to the mainland to meet officials.

"They said: `Who are you?''' Kamm recalls of his first encounters with the mainland authorities. "I said: `I understand you. I'll use all my good will to help you.'''

At the time, China was defiant over human rights and was suffering international trade sanctions following the massacre.

"China didn't have a lot of friends,'' Kamm recalls. "I happened to be in the right place at the right time. The Chinese government didn't think they needed human rights. Now they think human rights are important. They've been sold on the idea.''

Kamm has been working closely with the US State Department and Congress, supplying them with lists of prisoners that he and his volunteers put together by ploughing meticulously through official records, the media and libraries inside and outside China.

"Every day I have people approach me with cases and names,'' he says. He now has more than 7,000 names in his database, which is also used by the State Department.

Dui Hua's website states that its "core business'' is the preparation and delivery to the Chinese government of the prisoner lists. "Dui Hua has never had one of its lists rejected by a Chinese official, a boast few others in or out of government can make,'' the site says.

Kamm helps the State Department draft prisoner lists to submit to Beijing. China normally releases some prisoners shortly before high-profile meetings between Chinese and US officials. He also lobbies various congressmen to write letters about certain cases to show to the Chinese officials he meets.

Kamm moved his family to San Francisco in 1995 and established Dui Hua four years later. On his regular trips to the mainland, Kamm takes his lists to a variety of officials whom he refers to as "customers'' - local government officials, party committees, courts, prosecutors' offices, ministries of foreign affairs, justice departments and public security. "Just like selling chemicals, [I need to] be a businessman, look at the market and look at whom I can influence,'' says Kamm.

He has never been refused entry to the mainland or been repatriated, nor has he been persecuted or jailed. I ask him how he handles controversial cases such as Xinjiang and Tibetan prisoners.

He replies bluntly: "If you act naturally, it's not controversial. If you think it's controversial, then it's controversial.''

Now he's working on the cases of Yang Jianli, Rebiya Kadeer and Xu Zerong. Yang, a US green card-holder and pro-democracy activist, has been jailed on the mainland since 2002.

Kadeer, 57, is a Uyghur business-woman, women's rights activist and former member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress and Xinjiang's People's Congress. She was jailed after a Xinjiang court convicted her of "supplying state secrets to foreigners'' in 2000. Kamm made trips to Beijing lobbying for her release. In March, a Chinese foreign ministry official called Kamm saying Kadeer's eight-year jail term had been reduced by one year.

Xu, a Hong Kong permanent resident, was sentenced to 13 years in jail in 2002 after a Shenzhen court convicted him of "leaking state secrets'' in his research on the Korean War. Kamm tells me excitedly that he has just persuaded the Guangdong government to allow Xu, a historian, to receive books in his cell. "That's not bad. I worked on it for two years,'' Kamm says.

Munro says that in 1991 human rights groups were suspicious of Kamm's theory that China's economic reform would lead to less political oppression and greater political freedom. "Time has shown his argument to be wrong,'' Munro says.

Nonetheless, he says, Kamm was the first and still the only individual from the business community who speaks up on human rights issues. While some multinationals order corporate responsibility audits to be conducted on Chinese suppliers, no one else takes up political prisoner cases.

Kamm's success is inseparable from the "macro-climate'' - constant pressure imposed on China by the international human rights community, according to Munro.

He says Kamm and international human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International act as a "good cop, bad cop'' team.

"They [the human rights groups] beat up the Chinese government and inflict pain on them. Then John goes in as a good cop,'' he says. "The officials don't give John prisoners just because they like him. The Chinese government needs to have some good news happening on the human rights front.''

Munro warns that freeing a few political prisoners does not mean the system has changed. But getting political inmates out is always good news.

"John has a difficult balancing act. The Chinese government needs him. But there's no indication that he's acting as Beijing's publicity arm.''

Kamm is confident the MacArthur award will not dampen his mission: "There's a strong indication that the Chinese government is not displeased with me winning the award.''

He knows his way. "Here's the Tao: How many people get helped is important. But most importantly, by using this approach, no one is hurt. It's a win-win situation for everybody,'' he says.

rose.tang @ globalchina.com

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Source: "The Standard".